The Alfonso Artiaco Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of the solo exhibition by Wolfgang Laib, on Saturday, October 29th, 2016 at 12 am

For the fourth time (1992,1998,2008) at Alfonso Artiaco Gallery , Wolfgang Laib (Metzinger, 1950) intervenes in the gallery space in Piazzetta Nilo with 12 works.

The employment of natural materials, such as beeswax, rice and pollen; organic elements selected for their purity and symbolic meaning combined with the cool white, opalescent, solid marble and brass cones characterized the research and the practise of the artist throughout the rooms of the gallery.

The show opens with five brass ships on the floor posed in mounds of rice, symbol of spiritual nourishment. The ships evoke a journey to another world echoing the meditative attributes of the ziggurat that we will find later on the show. An invitation to cross the borders of a purely tangible world towards a higher spiritual comprehension level of the universe.

The walls of the second room of the gallery are dedicated to three extremely delicate drawings. Here, the possibility to glimpse the trace of the drawing is tightly connected to how the light reflects on the work and the result is a powerful emptiness pregnant with spiritual resonance. On the floor there are two marble rice houses, works that evoke enclosure and protection. The “seriality” that we find in Laib’s works through the years, is based on the idea of the eternal “recurrance of the same” which is key element in Buddism culture.

The main room of the gallery is occupied by the famous pollen piece. Here there is a perfect balance between object and space, where one augments the dignity of the other,
Laib has stated that “pollen is the potential beginning of the life of the plant. It is as simple, as beautiful, and as complex as this. And of course it has so many meanings. I think everybody who lives knows that pollen is important.” Pollen as a detail of infinity, a timless work.
The artist collects the pollen from around his home in southern Germany during the spring and summer months. Working with the natural sequence of the seasons, he harvests the pollen on each tree or flower when it is in bloom, beginning with hazelnut, moving on to dandelion and other flowers, and finally ending with pine. Each type of pollen is unique in color and size.

On view there are also four small ziggurat beeswax, here again as for how it was with the ships the evocation to other place is powerful and the archetypal shapes of the works produce in the viewer an effect of spiritual mistery. The ziggurat reflects the artist’s interest in pre-modern and non-western dwellings and spiritual spheres from ancient Middle Eastern and South Asian cultures.

Finally, the show closes with the last two rooms assigned to piles of rice. Another, iconic piece of the artists, whose aim to produce a calm composure, a “pacified disengagement”, a suspension from reality where the spiritual reality of the work is embodded in its materiality.
To make this piece a ritual discipline and repetition of creative gesture is required. The intense concentration and devotion virtually recall cerimonial acts.

Born in 1950 in Metzingen, Germany, Laib originally studied medicine. Disillusioned with Western medicine, he came to view the natural sciences, as well as most other modern thinking, as limited for their dependency on logic and the material world. His search led him to Eastern spiritualism, philosophy and pre-Renaissance thought. Since 1975, Wolfgang Laib has worked exclusively as an artist and has built an international reputation. In 2015, Laib has been honoured with the Praemium Imperiale. The Japanese prize, which is considered as one of the most prestigious art prizes in the world, is awarded for outstanding contributions to the development, promotion and progress of the arts.
Among the most important shows we would like to remember the following exhibition: Pollen from Hazelnut, Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA (2013), Wolfgang Laib, Basilica of Sant’Apollinare, Classe, Ravenna, Italy, (2013), MMK Museum fur Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt (2010), Museo Nacional de Arte, La Paz, Bolivia (2010), Fondazione Merz, Turin, Italy (2009), Without Beginning - Without End, MNCARS - Museo Nacional Centro de Arte, Reina Sofía, Madrid (2007), Fondation Beyeler, Basel (2005), Museum of Contemporary Art, MACRO, Rome (2005), Marugame Genichiro-Inokuma Museum of Contemporary Art, Marugame, Japan (2003), The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo (2003), Toyota Municipal Museum of Art, Toyota, Japan (2003), Retrospective exhibitions in U.S.A (Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, etc) (2000-2001), Documenta 7, Kassel (1982), Biennale, Venice, German pavilion (1982)

On Saturday, December 3rd, at 12 p.m., in the venue of via Cappella Vecchia, Katie Lipscomb (b. 1988) proposes a series of new works that explore the archetype of the cowboy and the western landscape. It will be the Texan-born/Philly-based artist's first European exhibition. In the exhibition, entitled “Cowboys in my Coffee”, gunmen, horses, cacti, boots, and hats parade in paintings and float on the wall as paper cut-outs/collage. As the artist describes, the cowboys are “part Messiah / part Yosemite Sam”, the images “equally reverent/irreverent”

Galleria Tiziana Di Caro presents the second solo exhibition featuring Tomaso Binga (aka Bianca Pucciarelli Menna, Salerno, 1931) hosted in the gallery’s premises, opening Wednesday, December 7, 2016, at 19:00. The exhibition includes a selection from the Polistiroli series of works of and the Ritratti Analogici. This exhibition, similarly to Scrivere non è descrivere [To Write is not to Describe] held in September 2015, aims at describing various moments of the artist’s production starting from the Seventies, which saw the outlining of the main guidelines that have made Tomaso Binga a central artist in our culture.

This exhibition is a sort of remake of two 1972 solo exhibitions both entitled Il polistirolo e i ritratti analogici and featuring the artist, the first held in Rome in May at the Paesi Nuovi Art Gallery and the second held in Naples in December at the Diagramma 32 art gallery. The two share one element on which Tomaso Binga based much of her production between 1971 and 1973: the use of polystyrene.

Binga creates collages by recycling packaging material found inside cardboard boxing and creating what in the Diagramma 32 exhibition catalog Italo Mussa called “image objects.” All sorts of packaging material are turned into works of art. Binga is attracted to polystyrene “as waste material” and uses it as such, almost without making any changes, retaining the exact marks of the objects originally contained in it. The polystyrene packaging is therefore considered for itself, without undergoing changes and manipulations; it does not contain a meaning, not even a metaphorical one, but is viewed as a sculptural form, preserving a precise volume in space, as well as the basis – when not an architecture when followed by an “operational procedure” – for the creation of a collage. And it is in the collages that stories are narrated, representations take place, anecdotes are told.
The exhibition opens with Autoritratto [Self-portrait], one of the few cases where Binga alters polystyrene by superimposing two volumes, a circular one representing a face and an horizontal one indicating the line of the shoulders, the whole completed by two images: a mouth and one eye (as to mimic winking). Although outlined with few essential elements, this face relentlessly manages to be mischievous and flirtatious.
In the next room we find an array of works in which of course the color white dominates, becoming the perfect backdrop for a variety of performances. What emerges from these works are symbols of various nature, such as part of the human body described through a personal anatomy, but also samples of “desemantizzata” writing, an element which will characterize Tomaso Binga's work throughout the decade
The exhibition ends with a series of Ritratti Analogici [Analog Portraits], two-dimensional works in which one of the historically more established painting genres, the portrait, is no longer yielded through figures, but through the initials of first or last names matched with various elements such as hands, legs and eyes. The graphic symbol replaces the detailed physiognomic description, and what really stands out is the presence and the appearance of the letters, anticipating an experience that will become central to Tomaso Binga’s work, especially in the most inventive phase of her production, which focused on the relationship between visual art and word.

Tomaso Binga took on this pseudonym in order to challenge, through humor and displacement, the privileges of the male world. She deals with verbal-visual writing and is among the leading figures of phonetic-sound-performative poetry in Italy.